White gold of the Sahara: salt from the Taoudenni mines the northernmost tip of Mali is still carried across the desert to Timbuktu by camels. It's a gruelling journey, but that didn't stop John Pilkington from experiencing it for himself

Geographical, May, 2007 by John Pilkington

Five hundred years ago, Saharan salt was literally worth its weight in gold, so the deposits at Taoudenni, in what is now the northernmost tip of Mali, must have been quite a find.

Camel caravans still make the 700-kilometre journey between the Taoudenni salt mines and Timbuktu--every week between November and February, caravans of tip to SO camels set out from Timbuktu. For the return journey, each camel is loaded with four slabs of salt, the so-called 'white gold' of the Sahara.

At the beginning of last year, I arrived in Timbuktu and started looking for a guide and camels. This proved surprisingly easy--Timbuktu is that sort of place--and within a couple of weeks, I had signed up with U Batna Ould Shehr, a Moor who knew the route well and came as a package with three good-looking camels.

No-one with any sense embarks on a long desert journey with a stranger, so before setting out, U Batna invited me to spend a couple of clays with his family at their encampment 40 kilometres north of Timbuktu. His parents were herders, striking camp two or three times a year to find fresh grazing for their animals, a routine unchanged since their ancestors arrived from Morocco during the 16th century. U Batna's five young children squealed with curiosity about their unusual guest, but his wife remained hidden in her tent until we were on the brink of departure, when she emerged shyly to see us on our way.

A good guide

The days soon settled into a rhythm. At Sam, I would awaken to find U Batna kneeling towards Mecca, deep in prayer. After three glasses of outrageously sweet tea, we would saddle up and be on our way by six. U Batna spoke only Arabic, a language of which I knew nothing, but as the trip progressed, he taught me the words we needed, such as 'camel', 'sand', 'rice', 'tea' and 'keep walking'.

The going was strenuous, but with a combination of walking and riding we kept up a good pace. At midday we would stop for rice and more tea, and then carry on until sunset.

There was no road--travellers to Taoudenni take routes of their own choosing-and at first I thought it impossible that U Batna would be able to navigate through the vast nothingness without even the tracks of previous caravans to guide him Gradually, however. I realised that he was taking cues from small variations in the dunes and in the desert surface. together with occasional pockets of vegetation. On the return journey, I was to find myself doing the same. and although I couldn't hope to match U Batna's declaration that "the way is in my head", I certainly understood what he meant.

Fodder for the camels was always a problem, and sometimes we would keep going long into the night looking for it. They had a particular liking for the desert tussock grass that the Moors call sabat, and judging by their uncontrollable excitement, they could detect it from a distance of at least 100 metres, even in the dark. It's true that camels store fat in their humps, but a hungry camel will soon will under the strain of the journey, so our camps were always pitched with the camels' needs at the front of our minds.

Water, on the other hand, was never a worry. As everyone knows, a camel can survive for a month without water, and I discovered that it can also carry up to 80 litres for its human companions. In the Sahara, the containers for this are made from the inner tubes of old lorry tyres. The tube is cut in half to make two curved rubber cylinders, whose ends are then sewn together, one being left open to form a spout--a great improvement on the traditional leaky leather pouches.

Primitive living

After three weeks, we reached Taoudenni, and despite all that I had read and heard, I was utterly shocked by the conditions there. The settlement had no streets, no houses, no fresh water, no electricity, no telephone--not even any cooking fuel, apart from camel dung. Daytime temperatures reach 30[degrees]C in winter and up to 50[degrees]C in summer. The 100 or so miners survive on a diet of rice and millet, supplemented by camel meat when a caravan offers them a sick or weak animal for slaughter. To slake their thirst, they can choose between drinking the brackish contents of local wells or paying a premium price for decent water to be brought in. It truly is a posting from Hell. People around the world use Timbuktu to symbolise remotest and most primitive place they can think of, but people in Timbuktu use Taoudenni; Taoudenni is Timbuktu's Timbuktu.

Salt has been mined in the Sahara since at least the fourth century, but the deposits at Taoudenni were only discovered during the 1500s. They come from an ancient time of higher rainfall when a lake occupied the Taoudenni basin. Having no outlet, its water became steadily saltier until, after many centuries, it turned into a pan of solid salt.

Later, this was overlain by mud and gravel, so the salt seams today lie some four metres below the flat surface of the basin. Working in teams of three or four, the miners dig large rectangular pits down to this level, then cut horizontal galleries in which they hack out the salt using crude handmade axes. From the surface, the only signs of their work are the spoil heaps, the gaping pits and the tap-tap-tap of the men below, bent double at their backbreaking labour.